Babraham Institute
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| Formation | 1949 |
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| Location |
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Key people
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Michael Wakelam Wolf Reik Len Stephens |
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Staff
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~350 |
The Babraham Institute, is an independent charitable life sciences institute involved in biomedical research, set in an extensive parkland estate just south of Cambridge. Its current director is Prof. Michael Wakelam.
The institute is located on the Babraham Hall estate, situated six miles south-east of Cambridge by the Gog Magog Downs, close to where the Via Devana, crossed the prehistoric Icknield Way. The estate includes Babraham Hall, designed in the Jacobean style by Philip Hardwick, which was built between 1832 and 1837. The hall was purchased by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in 1948 at the suggestion of Prof Ivan De Burgh Daly, together with 182 hectares of farm and woodand to become the Institute of Animal Physiology, Babraham.
In 1986, The Institute of Animal Physiology was joined with two Scottish institutes based at Roslin, The Animal Breeding Research Organisation (ABRO) and the Poultry Research Centre, to form The Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research (IAPGR) funded by the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC). In 1993, Roslin and Babraham formed two separate institutes, at which time the Babraham Institute assumed its current name. in 1994, The AFRC was disbanded and The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) was formed. All work with direct relevance to agriculture ceased in 1998.
The aim of the research conducted at The Babraham Institute is to discover the molecular mechanisms that underlie normal cellular processes and functions, and how their failure or abnormality may lead to disease. The institute has the status of a postgraduate department within the University of Cambridge and trains PhD students who are registered with the University's Faculty of Biology. The research laboratories of the institute are grouped into four programmes:
Research breakthroughs made at the Babraham Institute include the discovery of liposomes by Alec Bangham, the role of Inositol trisphosphate in the release of Calcium from intracellular stores by Michael Berridge, the discovery that genomic imprinting was carried by DNA methylation by Wolf Reik.
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